More perplexing though was Mozilla’s super vague public statement about the status of its current search agreement with Google–Firefox’s main moneyspinner, earning about $100 million, or 84% of its search revenue in 2010–which expired last month.

Mozilla says its search relationship with Google remains positive for both parties and that it is still “in active negotiations” with the search giant but stopped short of saying anything new. For its part, Google declined to comment.

This raises the question: with Google’s success in the browser space, what does it stand to gain by supporting a rival platform like Firefox?

Chairwoman Mitchell Baker acknowledges Mozilla’s relationship with Google is more complex than it used to be.

“If you look around the web, Google competes with a lot of its partners,” she told The Wall Street Journal in an interview in Singapore last month.

“Our revenue is not as diversified as some of those other folks – most of it comes from search and most of the search comes from Google, though not all,” she said.

This isn’t helped by the lack of competition in the search market although Baker does see promise in the other tieups Firefox has, such as those with Yahoo, Microsoft’s Bing, Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China.

Part of Firefox’s problem is the core propositions that gave it street-cred when it initially launched in 2004–privacy, data safety and user centrality–stand at odds with the current state of technologies shaping the web: cloud computing, social networking and mobile devices.

Still, Baker believes user sovereignty over data will re-emerge as a key issue in years ahead, even if current trends suggest a wider disregard for privacy concerns.

On this front, Mozilla is trying to develop a universal identity application that allows users to access their numerous accounts across the internet with one login and password while maintaining control of all the data specifics associated with that identity.

“Right now you either have a different user name and password at a million sites, which doesn’t work, or increasingly people start to use Facebook Connect and in that case Facebook becomes your identity,” she said.

In the same way, while the growth in mobile applications has been explosive, she expects the move in this space will be toward browser-based apps and away from native app clients that currently populate mobile systems. User-based search and management capabilities in the apps market is still almost nonexistent.

“Apps currently lack a lot of the traits of the web,” she says.

“It’s hard to combine them, they’re platform specific…apps ask for ridiculous permissions on your machines and they do whatever they want to your phones and most people don’t know.”

None of this seems particularly sexy and the details on how and when these applications will work remains as vague, true to Mozilla form.

“All of this sounds a little abstract sometimes but trying to describe why Firefox was needed before it shifted sounded pretty abstract too,” Baker said.